Agiloft announces general availability of Agiloft Astra, expanding access to contract AI for legal, procurement and finance teams - With new users getting to value in five minutes. General availability removes the waitlist; free plan includes unlimited users, uncapped Word Add-In access, strengthens integration between Astra and Agiloft CLM, and new AI agents for contract intake and updates REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 14, 2026 - Agiloft, the global leader in data-first contract lifecycle management (CLM), today announced the general availability of Agiloft Astra, its contract AI platform. Effective immediately, any legal, procurement, finance, or sales professional can start using Astra's free plan, with no waitlist or upfront costs required. Astra is designed to deliver value from the very first session, with new users achieving meaningful use in an average of five minutes. This announcement follows the close of Astra's Early Access Program, which launched in April this year. As with the Early Access Program, every Astra account under general availability operates under the Astra Clean Data Promise, which guarantees that customer contract data is never used to train AI models regardless of account tier. Agiloft Astra is built for legal, procurement, finance, and sales teams. Users upload agreements directly to the platform and can run AI-powered analysis to identify risk, flag non-compliant provisions, extract key terms, generate redlines, and ask plain-language questions about their contracts, across a single agreement or an entire portfolio. As tariff shifts, supply chain disruptions, and evolving vendor relationships continue to surface contractual exposure, Astra gives teams the ability to act quickly, applying consistent standards across their portfolios without the implementation timelines or budget commitments that have historically made enterprise contract AI inaccessible. A Free Plan Built for Enterprise Teams Astra's free plan includes uncapped use of Astra's Microsoft Word Add-In, enabling teams to create, review, and redline contracts without leaving the application. The plan also supports unlimited users across the organization at no cost. The free plan is designed as a practical starting point for organizations that may be determining where AI delivers the most value for their contracting operations, or how to build an internal use case for broader adoption. Teams can instantly bring their own supplier agreements, customer contracts, and sensitive documents to Astra and surface data-rich insights within minutes. Stronger Integration Between Astra and Agiloft CLM With general availability, Agiloft is also announcing a deepened integration between Astra and Agiloft CLM. Through Ask AI, Agiloft's in-platform AI assistant, CLM users can now identify contracts within their knowledge base and send them directly to Astra for analysis, enabling organizations to connect their full contract repository with Astra's analytics capabilities. Agiloft is also expanding the capabilities of Ask AI for CLM users with two new agentic capabilities designed to reduce manual effort across the contract lifecycle: · AI-Assisted Contract Intake enables users to upload a contract document and have structured data automatically extracted and used to create a new contract record in Agiloft, replacing a manual entry process that has historically introduced errors and delayed contract visibility. · Guided Contract Updates enables users to make guided updates to existing records, including key dates, contract status, and document attachments, through plain-language conversation within the Ask AI interface, eliminating manual navigation through the CLM. "Most professionals responsible for contracts within their organization have been working without the tools that would let them do their jobs properly," said Otto Hanson, VP of Product and GM of Astra at Agiloft."Astra was built to close that gap, giving professionals the tools they need, and giving the business the data and intelligence it needs to make faster, more confident decisions. When new users are getting value within five minutes, you stop asking whether the product works and start asking how fast you can get it in front of everyone who needs it." A key driver of the five-minute-to-value experience is Astra's standards-based reviews and redlining capabilities, which evaluates contract language against an organization's own internal playbook standards and risk thresholds using generative AI, instantly producing redlines and risk reports that would otherwise require hours of manual review. Users can instantly download from a library of expert-crafted community playbooks and begin reviewing contracts against established standards. Where Contract Teams Are Putting Astra to Work "We already had Agiloft running our contract operations; what Astra changed was what we could ask of that data," said Rick Lackner, Senior Corporate Counsel at The Imagine Group. "When your practice spans SaaS agreements, multi-million-dollar equipment transactions, and supplier contracts, any portfolio-wide analysis is a significant undertaking. We needed visibility into auto-renewal windows, pricing escalation clauses, and termination rights across a large supplier portfolio. With Astra, we surfaced that information and came out with a prioritized action list in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to doit manually." Organizations across procurement, legal, finance, and sales are managing contract portfolios under conditions that have changed faster than most agreements anticipated. · A procurement team can upload its vendor contracts and immediately identify every agreement approaching an auto-renewal window, along with the total dollar exposure and opt-out deadline for each one, giving teams the information they need to renegotiate or exit unfavorable agreements before they silently renew. · A compliance officer can scan an entire contract portfolio against a newly enacted regulation such as the EU AI Act and surface non-compliant terms or missing provisions before the enforcement deadlines arrive, replacing a manual review that would historically take weeks. · A finance director can identify every contract in the portfolio with annual price increase clauses, CPI adjustments, or cost escalation mechanisms and calculate the projected financial impact across the business. · A sales or deal desk team can analyze closed customer contracts to identify non-standard discounting patterns and margin erosion across the portfolio, giving revenue operations the visibility to enforce pricing governance before it affects the bottom line. In each case, Astra delivers that analysis on the organization's own contracts, without a lengthy deployment process or a large budget as a prerequisite. Availability Agiloft Astra is available now. Experience it for free. No setup, no upfront cost. About Agiloft Agiloft is a global leader in data-first contract lifecycle management (CLM), helping businesses improve outcomes. Its no-code CLM platform with embedded AI centralizes, automates, and governs contracts from request through renewal, reducing review times and integrating with over 1,000 systems for real-time visibility. Astra, Agiloft's contracts AI platform, unlocks post-signature data to drive better decisions across legal, procurement, sales, and finance teams. Backed by KKR, JMI Equity, and FTV Capital, Agiloft delivers strong performance with high implementation success and customer renewal rates, enabling organizations to create, control, and capture more value across industries today. Learn more at agiloft.com. Media Contact Angel Duan Senior Manager, Corporate Communications [email protected] (650)780-6741 ext. 5775

CLM software developer Agiloft hires GC from Mitsubishi HC Capital America. Kristin Knox Esche replaces CLO Jason Barnwell, who was promoted to chief product officer 23 June 2026 Kristin Knox Esche US contract lifecycle management platform Agiloft has hired Kristin Knox Esche as general counsel, replacing chief legal officer Jason Barnwell, who has moved to another role with the company. Esche joins from Mitsubishi HC Capital America, where she was deputy GC. She brings more than two decades of experience building legal functions, most recently helping modernise and centralise Mitsubish HC's legal function. Redwood City, California-based Agiloft develops contract lifecycle management software for a range of businesses, including financial services, healthcare, legal, pharma and manufacturing, among others. Advertisement Eric Laughlin, CEO at Agiloft, said: "Kristin has sat on the other side of the table from us as the legal leader actually living with the contracting problems we build software to solve. She has run legal operations inside companies going through real change: mergers, agile transformations, the early days of generative AI inside a legal department. That's exactly the perspective we want shaping our own legal function and informing how we build for customers like her." Esche arrives after just over a year at Mitsubishi, having previously spent 12 years at John Deere across a number of legal roles, latterly as associate chief counsel for global product organisation and innovation. Prior to that she worked in private practice at Davis Wright Tremaine, Overland Borenstein Scheper & Klm and Thelen Reid & Priest. LAW OVER BORDERS COMPARATIVE GUIDES Fashion Law Guide Fashion Law Over Borders Comparative Guide brings together leading fashion and intellectual property lawyers to provide a comprehensive analysis of the legal landscape shaping today's global fashion industry... | 2mos. She said: "I've spent my career translating complexity into clarity, whether that meant standing on a factory floor with engineers or designing the operating model for a unified legal department after periods of rapid inorganic growth. "What drew me to Agiloft is that every part of that experience finally points the same direction. I have been the customer this company builds for, and I am looking forward to helping shape what comes next, both inside Agiloft and for its customers." Barnwell, meanwhile, was promoted to chief product officer earlier this month. He originally joined as CLO last December from Microsoft, where he spent 15 years, the latter part as associate GC for monetisation and business planning. Earlier this month, US data and analytics business Alteryx hired Steve Holsten as its CLO from ElevenX Capital, replacing Christopher Lal who departed in May to join customer engagement platform Braze.

Agiloft, a contract lifecycle management software company, has appointed Kristin Knox Esche as General Counsel, effective 22 June. Esche brings over 20 years of legal operations and AI governance experience from engineering-driven and regulated organisations. Most recently, she served as Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Mitsubishi HC Capital America, where she modernised the legal function and implemented eBilling and matter management systems. Previously, she spent more than a decade at Deere & Company, supporting SEC reporting, corporate governance and product innovation, and helped establish Deere's AI governance working group. Esche holds a J.D. from UC Law San Francisco and serves on the Iowa Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission.